There have always been ignorant people, but they haven't always had college degrees to make them unaware of their ignorance. Some people imagine that they are well-informed because they have memorized a whole galaxy of trendy dogmas and fashionable attitudes.

— Thomas Sowell

There's no crying in the rank book.

— William Morton

There’s no logical connection between being smart and having money.

— Christopher Langan

There's nothing like the discovery of an unknown work by a great thinker to set the intellectual community atwitter and cause academics to dart about like those things one sees when looking at a drop of water under a microscope.

— Woody Allen

The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it wholeheartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solely or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ.'... He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison.

— C.S. Lewis

They were really willing to pay to avoid any trouble. No doubt they had overestimated the ability of academics to make a nuisance of themselves. It had been years since an academic title gained you access to major media.... Even if all the university professors in France had risen up in protest, almost nobody would have noticed, but apparently they hadn't found that out in Saudi Arabia. They still believed, deep down, in the power of the intellectual elite. It was almost touching.

— Michel Houellebecq

This irritated or puzzled such students of literature and their professors as were accustomed to ‘serious’ courses replete with ‘trends’ and ‘schools’ and ‘myths’ and ‘symbols’ and ‘social comment’ and something unspeakably spooky called ‘climate of thought.’ Actually these ‘serious’ courses were quite easy ones with the students required to know not the books but about the books.

— Vladimir Nabokov

This is not education my friend. It is a process of manufacturing computation devices that look like Homo sapiens, and thereby falsely labeled as Education.

— Abhijit Naskar

Through most of human history, our ancestors had children shortly after puberty, just as the members of all nonhuman species do to this day. Whether we like the idea or not, our young ancestors must have been capable of providing for their offspring, defending their families from predators, cooperating with others, and in most other respects functioning fully as adults. If they couldn't function as adults, their young could not have survived, which would have meant the swift demise of the human race. The fact that we're still here suggests that most young people are probably far more capable than we think they are. Somewhere along the line, we lost sight of – and buried – the potential of our teens.

— Robert Epstein

To be a scholar study math, to be a smart study magic.

— Amit Kalantri